ANNUAL MEETING & SPECIAL PRESENTATION

 

Sunday, May 18, 2025

                  3:30 p.m.: Annual Meeting of the Members of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Conference

4:00 p.m.: Special Presentation

“F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Composite Biography”

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Composite Biography foregrounds the inherently subjective (and never definitive) nature of biography. With each of 23 contributors, all of whom are Fitzgerald scholars, assigned a two-year span of Fitzgerald’s life, this approach encouraged each author to focus intently on providing idiosyncratic approaches that better approximate the heterogeneity of Fitzgerald as a biographical subject.

Editor/contributors Niklas Salmose (1918-1919) and David Rennie (1914-1915) will be joined by Helen Turner and Jackson R. Bryer, the authors of the first and last chapters in the book, for a discussion of the challenges and opportunities of writing their individual contributions in this unique format. The contributors will be asked how they approached responding to the allotted time frame and about which considerations shaped their decisions to emphasize––or omit––certain biographical details and contexts.

Niklas Salmose is Professor of English at Linnaeus University, Sweden, where he studies F. Scott Fitzgerald, modernism, nostalgia, intermediality, and environmental humanities. He is the co-author of Intermedial Ecocriticism: The Climate Crisis Through Art and Media (2024) and co-editor of  Transmediations: Communication Across Media Borders (2020), and Cultural Comets and Other Celestials (2022).

David Rennie teaches English at St. Machar Academy, Scotland. He is the author of American Writers and World War I (2020) and Sir Alexander Ogston: A Life at Medical and Military Frontlines (2023) and the editor of Scottish Literature and World War I (2020).

Helen Turner is an affiliated lecturer at Linnaeus University in Sweden and a classroom teacher in the United Kingdom. She is the author of Breaking Down Fitzgerald (xxxx) and of the forthcoming Ready to Teach: “The Great Gatsby”; and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, due to be published in 2025.

Jackson R. Bryer is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Maryland. He is the co-founder and president of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society and a member of the Organizing Committee of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival. The most recent of his several books by or about Fitzgerald is F. Scott Fitzgerald Remembered (2025), co-edited with Richard Reisinger